I thought I’d said everything I had to say about Los Angeles last winter. Should’ve known Hollywood would demand a sequel.
Even at the height of its considerable cultural influence, I never much cared for Sex and the City—for a very simple reason: I didn’t in any way recognize the New York it depicted.
As someone who’d grown up there, Sex seemed like a postfeminist fantasy of the city as a bastion of neoliberal materialism, conjured by someone who’d never actually been to New York or knew so much as the first thing about it. It certainly didn’t reflect the experience of any working-class New Yorkers I knew.
(It would seem the more things change, the more they stay the same: The recent SATC revival series, And Just Like That…, is reported to be full of unintentionally cringe-inducing scenes of the gals apparently interacting with Black women for the first time in their lives. Sounds on-brand.)
But this isn’t a retroactive reappraisal of a 1990s pop-cultural pacesetter—those have been exhaustively conducted elsewhere of late—merely an acknowledgment that the impression the series made on the generation of (largely) female Millennials who adored it is undeniable, legions of whom relocated to New York in early adulthood to have the full Sex and the City experience, and who, in turn, in many ways remade the city in Carrie Bradshaw’s image, for better or worse.
I can’t say as I blame those folks, really. That they were sold a load of shit isn’t their fault. Here in New York, we were just as susceptible to Hollywood’s greener-grass illusions of elsewhere. As a student in the 1990s, the Los Angeles of Beverly Hills, 90210 (1990–2000) and Baywatch (1989–2001), of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Clueless (1995), seemed like a fun-in-the-sun teenage paradise in stark contrast with the socially restrictive experience of my all-boys high school in the Bronx, where the only thing that ever passed for excitement were spontaneous gang beatings at the bus stop on Fordham Road.
The sunny schoolyards and neon-lit nighttime streets of L.A. carried the promise of good times, the kind that seemed altogether out of reach for me and my friends. The appeal of what California had to offer was so intoxicating, in fact, my two best pals and I spent an entire summer in the mid-’90s trying to make the streets of the Bronx look like Santa Cruz—a place none of us had ever been—for an amateur sequel to The Lost Boys, the ’80s cult classic about a coven of adolescent vampires who’ve (wisely) opted to spend eternity on the boardwalk. That notion unquestionably took hold of my impressionable imagination—it made me want to be a part of that culture, and tell those kinds of stories.
Accordingly, it’s fair to say it wasn’t merely the movie business that brought me to Los Angeles in my early twenties as an aspiring screenwriter, but arguably the romantic impressions of California itself imprinted upon my psyche by all those movies and TV series on which I came of age. Yet for the two decades I lived there, the city I’d always imagined L.A. to be—a place full of golden possibilities, as low-key as New York was high-strung—wasn’t the one I experienced. Not really. Not until last month, anyway.
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